Have you noticed low engagement or lagging performance in your email sends? Is your database filled with inactive leads? Or is your Marketo database up against its database tier limit? Are you concerned about trying to get European Union people to opt-in before the GDPR deadline? These are just a few reasons why many companies decide to run re-engagement programs.

I’ve been thinking about how best to re-engage leads that have not interacted with the company in a while. Over the years, we’ve tried just about every trick and tactic out there, but we keep coming back to a simple truth–people will continue to receive communications from a company when they perceive value in them.

As marketers, it is our job to show them the value. This means that we need to know our audience and figure out what information might be useful to their jobs–and that might not be the information we send about how cool our products or services are.

One of the benefits of running consistent re-engagement programs is to wake up leads in your database, figure out who is still interested and clear out any dead leads who might have changed jobs or are simply not interested.

Here is a 3-step formula for re-engage your prospects

1Identify the people that you would like to re-engage.

a. Start with leads that have not interacted with you for at least 6 months or longer, depending on your cadence of emails.

b. Remove competitors and people that do not fit your target.

c. Break up the lists into smaller segments and create small batch lists of 5,000 or less, if that makes sense for your business.

d. Schedule your batched lists 2 weeks apart, if you hit a spam trap, you’ll receive a notification from Marketo within the 1-2 week time frame, which will give you time to isolate the bad lead.

i. If you are working with older data, for example an audience that has been un-engaged for over a year, be aware that older data increases the risk of bounces, spam traps and possibly a bad reputation.

ii. Be careful not to over send, running 100k plus leads through a re-engagement program is a lot. You can further break down your lists by un-engagement of 6-12 months, 13-18 months, or 19-24 months.

2Create a 3-email nurture drip that shows the value in your relationship and monitor performance. Remind them of that value your company and emails provide. Since these are leads that haven’t engaged with your previous emails, you might consider some more risky copy that grab their attention.

a. You might be up to your eyeballs in email and not in need of our [your product or service], but here is some valuable information that can help make your job at [prospect’s company] easier. This whitepaper will give you …

b. At ABC Co, we want to stay connected to people like you that work hard to [ABC’s value prop: secure your networks, etc.], but we haven’t heard from you in a while, so we thought we’d ask if you’d like our whitepaper describing industry trends for [trend for this industry].

c. We used to work side-by-side back in the day, and we miss you. We get it, things are going well and the need is not there, but we wanted to see if you’d like our popular tips and tricks newsletter. Just because we’re not working together, doesn’t mean that we can’t still help you.

d. The deadline for GDPR will mean that marketing in Europe is going to get a little bit harder in May. Check out this GDPR checklist that will help you to be well prepared, or call Digital Pi and hear about our Gold Standard Data Compliance service that can get you there quicker!

3Create a preference center with options for which content they like, and how often they’d like to receive it.

a. I like the information that I receive from Digital Pi, keep it coming.

b. I like some stuff, but not everything. Let me choose.

c. I like the information, but I am too busy. Let’s cool it for 60 Days.